Seqera Labs partners with Genomics England to enhance genomic research capabilities

Seqera Labs partners with Genomics England to enhance genomic research capabilities

BARCELONA/LONDON, 25.05.23: Seqera Labs, the leading provider of secure workflow orchestration software in the life sciences sector, has partnered with Genomics England, the government-owned company that launched the 100,000 Genomes Project in partnership with the NHS. The new collaboration between Seqera Labs and Genomics England will enable whole genome analysis to be carried out at a larger scale with greater efficiency, helping more patients benefit from genomic healthcare and equipping researchers with extra data to find the causes of disease and develop new treatments.

Building on the UK’s reputation as a global leader in life sciences, Genomics England is working with the NHS to deliver whole genome sequencing as part of the NHS Genomic Medicine Service for patients with rare diseases and cancer. The data collected by Genomics England is stored in the National Genomic Research Library and can be accessed by approved researchers via a secure research environment enabling them to deliver groundbreaking insights into both therapeutics and diagnostics, and has been used by scientists to propose updated global guidelines to improve rare disease diagnosis.

The partnership with Seqera Labs will scale Genomics England’s capacity to develop models for disease diagnosis, prognosis and treatment response. Genomics England will deploy Seqera Labs’ Nextflow Tower, an intuitive, centralised command post that enables large-scale collaborative data analysis. With Tower, Genomics England will be able to quickly launch, manage, and monitor scalable data analysis pipelines within the cloud.

Edwin Clark, Senior Product Manager at Genomics England, comments: “At Genomics England our vision is to create a world where everyone can benefit from genomic healthcare. A decade on from the launch of the 100,000 Genomes Project, we’re continuing to work in partnership with the NHS to harness the potential of genomic medicine, connecting research and clinical care at a national scale so we can deliver benefits in diagnosis, treatment, and care for those living with rare conditions and cancer. Using Seqera Labs’ platform as part of our automated system for population-scale genomic analysis will accelerate our pipeline development and enable support for hybrid compute environments, helping us meet future demands and improve resiliency.”

As the demand for personalised medicine to treat diseases such as cancer booms, UK genomics research is helping to provide life-saving therapeutics to patients faster and more efficiently than ever. It is one of the leading markets for this in the world, although genomic medicine is set to transform a growing number of healthcare sectors as its market size is expected to reach USD 62.9 billion by 2028.

Evan Floden, Founder and CEO of Seqera Labs comments: “The impact Genomics England’s work is having through initiatives such as the 100,000 Genomes Project emphasises the importance of genomic research in helping to find diagnoses and develop new treatments. At a time when budgets are stretched and the UK’s health sector recovers from ripple effects of Covid-19’s disruption, providing technology and a service which streamlines budgets and allows for resources to be reinvested into improving people’s treatment is critical and a key pillar of our operation. We are thrilled to be working with Genomics England and look forward to partnering with them in its continued innovation in the genomics sector.”